Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?

#61

Post by sgarland » Mon, Sep 23, 2024, 2:03 AM UTC

RevEng wrote: post #53

sgarland wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This advice is repeated constantly, and it’s taken as gospel. If you / your team know what you’re doing, you can absolutely run your own stuff without it being a nightmare. I’ve worked at a 9-digit-ARR SaaS where we ran our own servers (as in, we owned physical servers, not a VPS), ran our own networks, etc. Everything was in IaC. There were shockingly few incidents compared to literally every other SaaS I’ve worked…

I don't disagree - there are people who are capable and willing to put in the effort. But I don't think that's most people - especially people asking how to do it. There's a lot to know about how to do things properly, so if you don't have at least one person who has been there and done that, I think it's not worth the effort.

Most people probably aren’t up for it, no, but I fear that if newer generations of devs just see “no, you can’t,” they’ll never try.

Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?

#62

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 23, 2024, 3:57 AM UTC

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #9

KaiserPro wrote: post #8

When I worked at a smallish company, we were upgrading our email calendaring system from a homegrown thing to some better. In my young year I was pushing for something like this, an off the shelf self hosted system. I was worried that slinging it out to a thirdparty would be both expensive and bad for my career. However I was wrong. Much as it was a dick to set up, migrating to Google (workspace? fuck knows what it w…

I love many things about the hacker ethos, but after being in tech for several years, I’ve learned the following painful lesson: Do not self host. The only thing you should ever self host is software your company wrote; unless you have a dedicated team for that specific piece of software alone. You will never meet the uptime of Google Workspace. Your tools will never have less bugs. You will never meet the security c…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?

#63

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL » Mon, Sep 23, 2024, 4:05 AM UTC

I was reading about this. It depends on a lot of things, however if you want end to end encryption, only cryptpad and seafile seem to have this capability.

Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?

#64

Post by aborsy » Mon, Sep 23, 2024, 4:25 AM UTC

robolange wrote: post #45

sellmesoap wrote: post #44

I see a lot of comments shying away from self hosting, to keep focused on your own product, or wanting the ability to shift blame onto the big providers when things go sideways. There are hosted Next Cloud options, has anyone had experience with these good or bad?

My main desire in trying NextCloud was syncing files with a handful of people, as a free software replacement for Dropbox. All of the other features were nice to haves. I've tried several of the "budget" NextCloud hosts. I'm not going to name names, but all of them were very disappointing. File syncing frequently broke in hard to diagnose ways. And from a perspective of overall service, I would get 502s, 503s, or 504…

Cryptomator works if you one user of vault. How do you handle conflicts with multiple people using vault?

Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?

#65

Post by kkfx » Mon, Sep 23, 2024, 4:50 AM UTC

Well... An IT startup should have no need of NexCloud/O365/Google suite and so on, simply because techies know how to share files and produce documents in way much better ways.

Staten that, as a POOR solution to collaborative works on documents NexCloud/O365/Google suite might be "good enough" for some, NextCloud is not on par, but near, the burden for IT is simply the fact these products are monsters alone, essentially impossible to really knows entirely in codebase terms, complex to heal when trouble happen etc.

So yes NextCloud could be used in professional settings, and owning their own infra is better than living on someone else computer, but the real point is if your employees really need such tools/paradigm or not. Someone in IT could collaborate with a shared repo, notes, makes slides in org-mode and so on. Someone much less skilled could still use BookStack and alike. Only end-users already trained on office-like stuff could like these monsters.

Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?

#66

Post by iforgotpassword » Mon, Sep 23, 2024, 4:51 AM UTC

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #30

iforgotpassword wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally, every time something doesn’t work (or, heaven forbid, you’ve been hacked), your company’s employees and lawyers can and will blame you instead of an unmovable entity. That's what it's really about. Modern day "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". It's not about the better solution, it's about blaming someone else if things go wrong. Azure has been completely hacked twice now, yet people still move t…

It doesn’t matter if it’s fair, it’s just reality. If you self-host for a business, and your self-hosted instance is hacked when other self-hosted instances of the same software weren’t, you are at risk for legal action and a possible criminal investigation. Was it really the software that was hacked, or were you negligent? Was it truly an accident, or did you have malicious intent? Plus, define negligent - does not…

We completely agree here. I just don't think that's how it's supposed to be. How could Microsoft get away with this? They should pay billions in damages or penalties. And specifically, anyone who decided to move anything to the Microsoft cloud after the two hacking incidents should be treated just like someone who ran a nextcloud instance and got hacked, should Microsoft be hit a third time.

I'm surprised someone finally has the guts to state it that clearly.

Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?

#67

Post by rickydroll » Mon, Sep 23, 2024, 5:00 AM UTC

stego-tech wrote: post #55

ensignavenger wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of companies that will host Nextcloud for you if you don't want to handle it yourself.

True, but now you've got to take the time to manage a non-standard groupware and collaboration suite from the perspective of an administrator, as well as onboarding your staff to something they're unlikely to be familiar with. All of this costs time, which startups don't necessarily have or is better spent trying to grow the business or solving harder/more pressing problems. Look, my job would be a lot more lucrative…

> All of this costs time, which startups don't necessarily...

Remember that it is easier to unwind a startup if you only need to turn off cloud services instead of disposing of equipment and support contracts.

Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?

#68

Post by aborsy » Mon, Sep 23, 2024, 6:57 AM UTC

pointlessone wrote: post #38

aborsy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU is worried about the European data stored in US (for good reasons). They don’t want their digital assets leave the region, even if the American services are good. The price is also not $10 per month. You have to increasingly upgrade for features that Nextcloud offers for free, particularly if they are used by enterprise (like multi user accounts).

You can get Storage Box from Hetzner for like €10. It’s a simple Samba/WebDAV/SFTP network drive and works fine. Nothing fancy, just storage.

That’s hosted storage. It will be hosted in EU, but otherwise is similar to hosting on Google.

In my opinion, nextcloud makes sense when you want to host your data on your hardware.

Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?

#69

Post by preya2k » Mon, Sep 23, 2024, 8:02 AM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #48

preya2k wrote: post #32

In my opinion it’s not a good alternative if you or your team members expect exactly the same quality of service. When you switch to Nextcloud you’ll have to expect more bugs, less reliability, less performance and obviously more maintenance (since it's typically self-hosted) compared to Google Drive, Dropbox or One Drive. So you'll have to go into this with a different kind of mindset. What you gain is independence,…

> - Nextcloud (aka Collabora) Office is very slow if you want to actually work collaboratively with it (no matter the power of your Collabora server) – unfortunately it's no match for Google Docs or Office 365 What about onlyoffice ? Can you confirm your experience comes from a nextcloud instance and a collabora instance on two different servers ? What was the bottleneck ? Network traffic ?

It's been a while since I used OnlyOffice, can't really speak to its performance.

I think mostly the sluggishness comes from some input delay in the browser. When you open a Collabora Calc document and select any random cell, it just takes a couple of hundred miliseconds till the cell is actually selected. I can reproduce this with brand new instances, no matter how beefy the server is.